Coming soon: 3 for June from Eric Brown, Garry Kilworth and James Everington

June will be a big month for us at infinity plus, with three big titles to be published in paperback and a variety of electronic formats.

 

Salvage by Eric Brown

When Salvageman Ed saves Ella Rodriguez from spider-drones on the pleasure planet of Sinclair’s Landfall, he has no idea what he’s letting himself in for. Ella is not at all what she seems, as he’s soon about to find out.

What follows, as the spider-drones and the Hayakawa Organisation chase Ed, Ella and engineer Karrie light-years across space, is a fast-paced adventure with Ed learning more about Ella – and about himself – than he ever expected.

The Salvageman Ed series of linked stories – four of which appear here for the first time – combine action, humour and pathos, from the master of character-based adventure science fiction.

“Eric Brown’s modest, slightly retro, extremely charming and very human voice has been a distinctive, indeed unique, presence in British SF for many years. Here he offers another interlinked selection of stories which, as is typical of Eric Brown, manage to be small scale, close-up, and completely free of heroic posturing, in spite of the galactic scale of their setting. There is something restful about them, something comforting. Yet while they gently entertain, they also, very quietly, deal with big questions about identity, love, and the relationship between body and soul.” Chris Beckett

 

The Fabulous Beast by Garry Kilworth

A set of beautifully crafted tales of the imagination by a writer who was smitten by the magic of the speculative short story at the age of twelve and has remained under its spell ever since.

These few stories cover three closely related sub-genres: science fiction, fantasy and horror. In the White Garden murders are taking place nightly, but who is leaving the deep foot-prints in the flower beds? Twelve men are locked in the jury room, but thirteen emerge after their deliberations are over. In a call centre serving several worlds, the staff are less than helpful when things go wrong with a body-change holiday.

Three of the stories form a set piece under the sub-sub-genre title of ‘Anglo-Saxon Tales’. This trilogy takes the reader back to a time when strange gods ruled the lives of men and elves were invisible creatures who caused mayhem among mortals.

Garry Kilworth has created a set of stories that lift readers out of their ordinary lives and place them in situations of nightmare and wonder, or out among far distant suns. Come inside and meet vampires, dragons, ghosts, aliens, weremen, people who walk on water, clones, ghouls and marvellous wolves with the secret of life written beneath their eyelids.

‘Kilworth’s stories are delightfully nuanced and carefully wrought.’ Publishers Weekly

‘A bony-handed clutch of short stories, addictive and hallucinatory.’ The Times

‘Here is a writer determined and well equipped to contribute to the shudder-count.’ The Guardian

 

Falling Over by James Everington

Sometimes when you fall over you don’t get up again. And sometimes, you get up to find everything has changed:

An ordinary man who sees his face in a tabloid newspaper. A soldier haunted by the images of those he has killed from afar. Two petty criminals on the run from a punishment more implacable than either of them can imagine. Doppelgängers both real and imaginary. A tranquil English village where those who don’t fit in really aren’t welcome, and a strange hotel where second chances are allowed… at a price.

Ten stories of unease, fear and the weird from James Everington.
“Good writing gives off fumes, the sort that induce dark visions, and Everington’s elegant, sophisticated prose is a potent brew. Imbibe at your own risk.” – Robert Dunbar, author of The Pines and Martyrs & Monsters

“The horror angle in the stories is almost always a metaphor for other things – loneliness, fear, isolation, regret. The word “haunting” really does double duty here… Beautifully written, evocative, masterful…what shines through these stories is the author’s love of language.” Red Adept Reviews, 2011 Indie Awards Short Story category

“Everington is excellent at evoking a mounting sense of unease, turning to dread, that close, oppressive feeling when everything is still and ordinary, but the whole world is filled with the sense that something huge and terrible is just about to happen.” Iain Rowan, author of One Of Us and Nowhere To Go

Grumpy Old Writers, or The Grampa/Grandma List: promising speculative fiction authors over the age of 40

It started with a tweet in response to the publication of Granta’s Best Young Novelists list for 2013…

It is the most shattering experience of a writer’s life when he wakes one day and says quite reasonably, I will never make the Granta list.
@davidmbarnett

For, alas, if a writer is past the age of 40 he or she is deemed too old to be promising.

Some of us would set that benchmark differently. Far too many years ago, for example, I had to ask the editors of Interzone to stop referring to me as a ‘promising young writer’ as I had turned the grand old age of 30.

But then seven years later I was suddenly young and promising again: back in 2003, in my YA guise as Nick Gifford, I was on Waterstones’ list of bright young things, aka Faces of the Future (sneakily published a few weeks ahead of Granta‘s list for that year).

So, to narrow down the criteria… For an alternative list we’re looking for promising writers over the age of 40. Or 30. Or something in between. Let’s say 40 – that’s Granta‘s glass ceiling, so let’s re-use it.

Genre? Well much as I’d like to set no such limitations, let’s face it: I know far more about genre authors than I do about the lit’ry mainstream, speculative fiction authors in particular. Even then, there are lots I’d be likely to miss out, purely through my own oversight.

Nationality? I’d rather not, but it’s convenient, so as I’m UK-based let’s keep it local by sticking to authors who are based here, published here or have some other strong claim to being promising in the UK.

But then, as the Twitter exchange developed, we started referring to Grumpy Old Writers.

Woah, there!

Stamping down on the danger that we would branch into two rival lists almost as soon as we’d got started, let’s merge the two, and here are our criteria:

Promising speculative fiction authors with a UK presence, 40 or older, who I’m aware of and haven’t momentarily forgotten to include, and able to be grumpy about all these young upstarts invading our turf.

So who gets onto this list of significant oldcomers?

The Grampa List (first draft)
[also, please be reassured that I could be completely wrong here, both about the levels of grumpiness and the age...]

• David Barnett (has published some interesting stuff already, but destined to make a big splash with his forthcoming steampunkery from Tor)
• Chris Beckett (shortlisted for this year’s Arthur C Clarke and BSFA awards, perhaps he’s getting too much attention already)
• Eric Brown (the perennial professional, like bindweed he keeps on putting out superb stories, occasionally getting lots of attention and then just keeping on plugging away)
• Jaine Fenn (first novel only appeared five years ago, so definitely in the youngish upstart category)
• Jon Courtenay Grimwood (ooh… controversial: surely Jon’s profile lifts him above the promising category? Well yes, I’d hope that would be most people’s response, but has he really achieved the acclaim he deserves?)
• Dave Hutchinson (SF stalwart, capable of brilliance, and I wish he’d write more; and he’s promised to keep the grumpiness quotient up if others fall short)
• Liz Jensen (dark, creepy, slipstream, always interesting)
• Juliet McKenna (the kind of author this list could have been made for: a top-notch fantasy author who deserves a lot more success than a bunch of other fantasy authors I’m not going to name until you buy me another drink)
• Jeff Noon (bright young star who went quiet, but now is bursting back onto the scene with an anniversary edition of his classic Vurt, lots of reissues, online experimentation and pushing of limits, and new books, too)
• Ian Sales (such a fixture on the UK SF scene that most people probably think he’s published more than he has; winning this year’s BSFA short fiction award is surely the start of greater things)
• Anna Tambour (okay, the link is tenuous: she’s based in Australia but has had much of her work published in the UK; I’ve no idea how old she is; and anyway, I love her writing so she’s on my list – in fact, I like her work so much that I talked my way into writing a foreword for her first book and have subsequently produced ebook editions of two of her books)
• Jo Walton (too successful already? Perhaps, but much of her success has come in the US – over here she’s one of those who deserves more…)
• Liz Williams (…as is Liz Williams, a fabulous author who shrugs off genre limitations, and has also published the non-fiction Diary of a Witchcraft Shop)
• Neil Williamson (like David Barnett, Neil is a genuine old upstart, with some impressive short fiction publications behind him and a much-anticipated first novel due out in 2014)

Because of the rather unscientific approach taken here, I know this list is not comprehensive, hence my labelling it ‘draft’. Who else should be on it? Who shouldn’t? And what would an equivalent list be without the UK-ish restriction, or with some other arbitrary geographical limits?

Snapshots: Robert Freeman Wexler interviewed

What kind of writer are you?
Geologic. Words, thoughts, ideas materialize slowly and find their way to the page.

What are you working on now?
A novel, tentatively called Recollections of a Malleable Future, but I also call it New Springdale Novel, because it’s set in Springdale.  I’m around a third of the way through it, but I’ve put it on hold to work on a novella.  The novella is a historical/Western-ish thing set around the Gulf Coast of Texas in 1888.  It’s a crime/detective story with strangeness.  I’m about halfway through and still trying to think of a title.

What’s recently or soon out?
This is the longest period I’ve had without new things out.  I’m looking for a publisher for a short story collection.  The Western novella is supposed to come out from PS at World Fantasy in Brighton…assuming I finish in time.

In Springdale Town is one of those stories that plays with the boundaries between the weird and the very real. Tell us about the story’s origins and why it became something you had to write.
It really started when I went to a movie theater and no one was there (I describe that situation in the Afterword; that doesn’t mean it really happened—I fabricate many things—but in this case it’s true). I had been thinking about writing a Jonathan Carroll-type of story in which the people from a television drama are actually real. After writing a bit about a man who can’t find other people, I realized that I had found the television program story. And had hooked myself, so I had to finish it.

Describe your typical writing day.
I write for twenty to thirty minutes Monday through Thursday during lunch breaks at work, then longer on Fridays. Rarely on the weekends. I wish I had more time, but I’ve learned to be efficient with the time I have.

What would you draw attention to from your back-list?
Besides In Springdale Town, newly released in ebook from Infinity Plus…? I’m still (after all these years) looking for a U.S. publisher for The Painting and the City. It came out in 2009 from PS, in French translation from now-defunct Zanzibar Editions, audiobook from iambik audiobooks…but no U.S. publisher.

Which other authors or books do you think deserve a plug?
I recently posted on my blog about a fine contemporary noir novel called Robbers, by Christopher Cook. Older writers, Robert Aickman and Arthur Machen, newer writers, Michael Cisco, Brendan Connell, Kaaron Warren, Sébastien Doubinsky, other writers available from Infinity Plus, Iain Rowan, Neil Williamson, Anna Tambour.

Who are the people who’ve made a real difference to your writing career?
Teachers from Clarion West: Lucius Shepard, Michael Bishop, Nicola Griffith, people who’ve published me, mainly Peter Crowther of PS—without him the world would be a sadder place of fewer books.

If you were to offer one snippet of writing advice what would it be?
Don’t write what you think will sell. Write what comes from yourself, in a way that only you can write it. Otherwise you’ll sound like everyone else. There’s a market for people who sound like everyone else, so you’ll sell a lot more books than me, but that’s my advice.

So… the easy one: what’s the future of publishing? How will writers be making a living and publishing in five or ten years? What will readers be reading?
I can’t tell you. I figured it out, but it’s a secret. No one else has figured it out. Just me. All will be revealed at the proper moment. No sooner.

Any other questions you’d like to have been asked? Feel free to add and answer them, and I’ll pretend to have asked them.

I’d like to say thanks for putting this new Springdale ebook together. It’s great to give new life to the story, send it out to find new readers.

More…

Robert Freeman Wexler’s latest novel is The Painting And The City, PS Publishing 2009. His new infinity plus novella, In Springdale Town, originally came out in 2003 from PS Publishing and was reprinted in Best Short Novels 2004, SFBC, and in Modern Greats of Science Fiction, iBooks; his other work includes a novel, Circus Of The Grand Design (Prime Books 2004 and infinity plus ebooks, 2011), and a chapbook of short fiction, Psychological Methods To Sell Should Be Destroyed (Spilt Milk Press/Electric Velocipede 2008). His stories have appeared in various magazines and anthologies, including Polyphony, The Third Alternative, Electric Velocipede, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. He lives at Sanity Creek, Ohio with his wife, the writer Rebecca Kuder, and daughter Merida Kuder-Wexler.

Buy stuff:

• In Springdale Town
  amazon.com | amazon.co.uk
• Circus Of The Grand Design
  amazon.com | amazon.co.uk
  

 

New: infinity plus quintet

stories by Garry Kilworth, Lisa Tuttle, Neil Williamson, Stephen Palmer and Eric Brown
edited by Keith Brooke

Five stories from top writers of speculative fiction: science fiction, fantasy and the downright strange, stories from the heart, stories to make you think and wonder.

The stories in this volume are:

“Filming the Making of the Film of the Making of Fitzcarraldo” by Garry Kilworth

“Flying to Byzantium” by Lisa Tuttle

“Arrhythmia” by Neil Williamson

“Dr Vanchovy’s Final Case” by Stephen Palmer

“The Girl Who Died for Art and Lived” by Eric Brown

Available from:

• amazon.com
• amazon.co.uk
• kobo
• smashwords

New: two from Jason Erik Lundberg

Two new infinity plus titles from Jason Erik Lundberg, each crammed with intelligent, exotic fantasy:

The Alchemy of Happiness – three stories and a hybrid-essay

The Alchemy of Happiness: a triptych of stories rooted in Southeast Asian myth and legend, literary fantasy at its very best.

In the beginning were the four: Water, Fire, Air, and Earth. Arriving simultaneously with the creation of the world, these archetypal elementals shaped humanity from the very start; two of the four continue to do so.

BLUE—The first trickster, fluid and fickle, holder of all the answers, and, therefore, of all the power.

DANE—The loyal lieutenant and enforcer, dispatching fiery judgment without question.

In various guises and forms, through the interstices of our reality and multiple afterlives, these two ancient but flawed siblings seek to find the one metaphysical formula that will lead them out of the never-ending cycle of suffering. Like all of us, human and demigod alike, they yearn for the pure land of endless bliss.

This volume also features “Embracing the Strange,” a 14,000-word hybrid essay on the transformative power of speculative fiction, as well as “Represented Spaces,” a wide-ranging interview with Jason Erik Lundberg by author and editor Wei Fen Lee.

[As a special bonus, anyone who purchases a copy of The Alchemy of Happiness gets a link to a free copy of Jason's collection Red Dot Irreal.]

“The writing is smooth and crisply visual, and the dialog sparkles … Go with the flow, and you’ll meet an interesting character who ultimately is given a thought-provoking choice, one which comes with a unique sacrifice.”
—Douglas Hoffman, Tangent, on “Reality, Interrupted” (the first story in The Alchemy of Happiness)

“A fantasy tale of the highest calibre, at times I thought I was reading the last chapter of a great novel and it has certainly made me want to hear more from this author. A world of magic suddenly springs from a fairly ordinary beginning as Goran soon realises that things are not what they seem, and he quickly plunges into a new and disturbing world that is set to change his life forever.”
—Tracy Sherrin-Miller, Whispers of Wickedness, on “Reality, Interrupted”

“Lundberg’s writing is that of an Old Soul who views the world through Young Eyes; his work is jamais vu of the highest order.”
—James A. Owen, author and illustrator of Here, There Be Dragons

Available from:

• amazon.com
• amazon.co.uk
• kobo
• smashwords

Red Dot Irreal – Equatorial Fantastika

Travel to Southeast Asia on wings of the fantastic for Jason Erik Lundberg’s debut short-story collection Red Dot Irreal. There you’ll meet pirates and shamans, wise fish and mystical storytellers, living monuments and paper animals, time travelers and civet cats, stone taxi drivers, floating dental patients, and a sentient bird park. Once you enter the surreal worlds of Lundberg’s equatorial fantastika, a part of you will never leave.

Bonus: extra stories “Big Chief”, “Occupy: An Exhibition” and “Bachy Soletanche” have been added for this electronic edition.

“Stories exotic, spicy, and redolent as a four-star curry. A fine meal for the mind awaits you in Lundberg’s collection.”
—Jonathan Carroll, author of Outside the Dog Museum

“Lundberg’s writing is that of an Old Soul who views the world through Young Eyes; his work is jamais vu of the highest order: these stories are memories encountered for the first time, but never to be forgotten once they’ve been experienced.”
—James A. Owen, author and illustrator of Here, There Be Dragons

“Red Dot Irreal is a box made of the finest equatorial wood, containing a collection of genu-ine gems of the early 21st century noble art of fantastika.”
—Zoran Zivkovic, author of The Last Book

“Red Dot Irreal teems with imagination, location, originality, and fine writing.”
—Jeffrey Ford, author of The Empire of Ice Cream

Available from:

• amazon.com
• amazon.co.uk
• kobo
• smashwords

New: The Emoticon Generation by Guy Hasson

Guy Hasson’s The Emoticon Generation features seven stories about life-changes brought about by our new electronic generation: stories that blur the borders between our world and science fiction, stories that make you ask, ‘Has this already happened? Is that actually true?’

In this collection you’ll find a man who, after losing his fiancée to a terrible accident, seeks to learn if true love really exists; a girl, hardly a teen, who searches for her father only to learn a terrible truth about herself; a man who wants to immortalize his genius but ends up tricking himself out of it; an old hero whose entire life unravels when the truth about his heroic act is revealed; a harmless birthday gift that triggers a profound search into the depths of a young couple’s relationship; and more.

Guy Hasson is one of the freshest new science fiction authors out there, with a knack for finding the human heart in the biggest ideas.
“Hasson has a scalpel-sharp intellect which, allied to great ideas and a superb story-telling ability, makes for a wonderfully entertaining collection.” –Eric Brown

“Guy Hasson writes with a deceptive smoothness, in the assured hand of an Old Master, and with a deep concern for the big questions of science fiction. You need to read him.” –Lavie Tidhar, World Fantasy Award winner for Best Novel 2012

The Emoticon Generation by Guy Hasson is available in ebook format from:

• Amazon.com
• Amazon.co.uk
• Smashwords
•  Kobo

Snapshots: Tim Lebbon interviewed

Your most recent novel, Coldbrook, is a refreshing take on Zombie Apocalypse: grounded in science, with the apocalypse – while suitably gory – a backdrop for the stories of some compelling, and very human, characters. What drew you to a sub-genre that could easily be seen as played out by now?

Partly because I’d never written a zombie novel, and partly because I wanted to try to write one that was suitably different. Oh, and also because I wanted to destroy the world again. I’ve done that so many times in novellas and short stories, but only once or twice in novels. So I wanted to write my own great big apocalyptic novel, and Coldbrook is it (so far … there will be more). I’d written a couple of short stories featuring zombies, and my novel Berserk is, I’m told, a zombie novel (though the Z word never once crossed my mind when I was writing it). I’ve also become fascinated with multiverse theory (who can’t be fascinated with it?) and wanted to wrap that into a novel at some point. This seemed the ideal one.

What’s the reaction been to Coldbrook?

It’s had excellent reaction from readers and reviewers so far. The novel took a long time coming – it was actually with another publisher for a while, and they publicised it pretty widely – so to actually see it out from Hammer at last was great. I think by then there were quite a few people itching to read it.

Your Toxic City trilogy has just been snapped up by ABC for development as a TV series. Tell us more about what will be happening.

Yes, that’s really exciting. I’m not heavily involved in the writing process (although I’m here as a consultant). ABC Studios optioned the trilogy, and it was immediately sold to ABC Network. What this means is that the pilot script has been commissioned, and writer Jaime Paglia is working on that right now (I’ve seen the proposal and it’s amazing). Early in 2013 we should hear more. It’s a much quicker process than any movie option, some of which I’ve had hanging for literally years.

I’m very positive about Toxic City because of the great team attached. Jaime wrote A Town Called Eureka (SyFy’s longest running series). And the director Alex Proyas is known for The Crow, I, Robot, and Dark City, amongst others. Watch this space!

Will this TV attention change your writing in any way? For instance, are you drawn to writing more televisual and cinematic work, either as scripts or with a view to adaptation?

I am writing scripts occasionally, and I’d love to do more. I’m working on a TV proposal myself right now for the UK, writing the pilot on spec (because I’m not known as a screenwriter), and I’m pretty excited about that. I’m also writing a spooky animated kids’ movie called My Haunted House for a UK producer and director. I’ve written a script with Steve Volk that’s doing the rounds, and Chris Golden and I adapted our first Secret Journeys of Jack London novel for 20th Century Fox. I love screenwriting and hope to do more of it in the future.

But writing novels and novellas, no, I never really think about the screen side of things. If you do that you might as well write a screenplay … and a novel should be what it needs to be. After I’ve written something I think about it, of course, because that’s the business. I think Coldbrook would make an amazing movie or TV series – imagine each episode taking place in a different Earth! – but the budget would be immense.

What are you working on now?

The script I mentioned above, My Haunted House. The pilot script for my TV proposal, tentatively titled Breaking Rocks. A short story with Mike Marshall Smith for an anthology. A YA novel with Mark Morris, The Trials of Toby Stone. A new novella for Spectral Publications. And just yesterday I heard that I’ve sold a new novel from a proposal, called The Silence, so I’ll be amping up to start that after Christmas. Lots of other stuff too … a new script, another novella, another TV proposal in the USA… all at varying stages, of course.

What will we see from you in the near future?

The second and third books in the Toxic City trilogy are due out next year, as well as my Star Wars novel Dawn of the Jedi: Into the Void. Coldbrook will have a US release next year, too, which is great news. And at World Fantasy 2013, my new novella from Spectral will be launched.

Describe your typical writing day.

It usually fits around the kids going to school and my wife working. So I’ll start writing around 10am and usually finish around 3 or 4 when the kids come home. I do other stuff early morning and evenings, like emails, interviews, all the business side of things. And I also do a lot of exercising now – cycling, running, swimming – in preparation for an Ironman race next year, so that all fits in between everything else.

But some days, there’s a lot of window staring. Just part of the process.

What would you draw attention to from your back-list?

For horror lovers, my novella collection White and Other Tales of Ruin. For fantasy lovers, my first fantasy novel Dusk (although I’d say that Fallen is better). And for something a bit different, my novella The Thief of Broken Toys.

Which other authors or books do you think deserve a plug?

I’m a big fan of Paul Meloy, a UK writer who only writes a few stories per year. His collection Islington Crocodiles is fabulous. Also, Adam Nevill is a fantastic writer, and he’s continuing his success writing horror novels. Perhaps my favourite of his up to now is The Ritual. Helen Marshall is a Canadian writer everyone needs to watch out for, her first collection of short fiction, Hair Side, Flesh Side, is out now and it’s staggeringly good.

If you were to offer one snippet of writing advice what would it be?

Never give up.

So… the easy one: what’s the future of publishing? How will writers be making a living and publishing in five or ten years? What will readers be reading?

I wish I knew. Easy question first … I think readers will be reading the same stuff they are now, but with much easier access to different work, I’d hope that horizons expand. We certainly live in interesting times, and publishing is very volatile right now. I’m discovering that myself. I think everyone has to embrace the change rather than being afraid of it, because it can’t be stopped. Some people I know predict the end of publishing houses and agents entirely, but I don’t for a moment think things will go that far. There’s still business to be done, and most writers I’m sure would rather just write. Things will change, and then settle. I have a decent sized backlist that I’m keen to get out there as ebooks … but I’m not rushing things.

More…

Tim Lebbon is a New York Times-bestselling writer from South Wales. He’s had almost thirty novels published to date, as well as dozens of novellas and hundreds of short stories. Recent releases include Coldbrook, London Eye, Nothing as it Seems and The Heretic Land. Future novels include Into the Void: Dawn of the Jedi (Star Wars). He has won four British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award, and a Scribe Award, and has been a finalist for International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, and World Fantasy Awards.

A TV series of his Toxic City trilogy is in development with ABC Network in the USA. He is working on new screenplays and TV proposals.

Find out more about Tim at his website www.timlebbon.net

Buy stuff:

• Coldbrook
  Amazon US | Amazon UK
• London Eye: Toxic City #1
  Amazon US | Amazon UK
• White and other tales of ruin
  Amazon US | Amazon UK

New from infinity plus: Ghostwriting by Eric Brown

Over the course of a career spanning twenty five years, Eric Brown has written just a handful of horror and ghost stories – and all of them are collected here.

They range from the gentle, psychological chiller “The House” to the more overtly fantastical horror of “Li Ketsuwan”, from the contemporary science fiction of “The Memory of Joy” to the almost-mainstream of “The Man Who Never Read Novels”. What they have in common is a concern for character and gripping story-telling.

Ghostwriting is Eric Brown at his humane and compelling best.

How to buy Ghostwriting

Available in various ebook formats or a rather nice trade paperback.

print edition:
…CreateSpace (trade paperback, $11.99; this option gives the best royalty to the author)
…Amazon US (trade paperback, $11.99)
…Amazon UK (coming soon)

ebook edition:
…amazon.com (Kindle format, $2.99)
…amazon.co.uk (Kindle format, £1.99)
…Smashwords (various formats, including epub, mobi, Sony and PDF, $2.99)

Guest post: Worldbuilding… what’s not to like? by Richard Ford

Okay, I confess: I hate worldbuilding! Do I think a map is important in a fantasy novel? No, not really. Should a writer develop their own version of Elvish? Don’t be daft!

Now, before you leap straight to the comments at the bottom in a flurry of righteous indignation to demand how I can claim to be a fantasy writer without a deep and abiding love for all things ‘backgroundy’, let me explain.

Firstly, it’s not that I can’t do worldbuilding, it’s just that other people do it so much better. Having worked in the pen & paper RPG industry for several years, I’ve come across a lot of games with rich, lush backgrounds, created over decades by scores of contributors. How am I meant to compete?

The world of Faerun, in which the Forgotten Realms RPG supplements, computer games and novels are set, was originally devised by Ed Greenwood, but since then he has passed on the mantle to other creators who have gone on to develop its rich history, cultures and cataclysmic events, spanning centuries. Warhammer 40K’s Imperium of Man was first developed 25 years ago, but has since evolved into a behemoth of a background with scores of codices, computer games and over a hundred novels filling the gaps in the vastness of its space. One of the earliest RPG backgrounds was RuneQuest’s Glorantha, which has had not one, not two, but three ages. Count them! And trust me, I’ve worked on some Glorantha products and may well have let slip some continuity errors. Trust me when I say, the long time fans weren’t happy, but in my defence there’s a hell of a lot to know if you’re new to it.

And it’s not just RPGs. Star Wars now goes beyond the limits of the movies, crafting an intricate Expanded Universe which tells its tales across various media and in various timelines that cover thousands of years. These new stories from dozens of contributors are arguably as deep and abiding as the tales of Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, to which anyone who’s ever played computer games in the Old Republic, or read the novels and comics that continue the background well beyond Return of the Jedi, will attest.

Skyrim, the latest Elder Scrolls computer game (number V, I believe) is the latest set in a world that continues to grow and expand as much, if not more, than any novel series or pen & paper RPG you might delve into.

But other novelists manage to build convincing worlds, I hear you cry, you’re clearly just a lazy git.

Well, that’s one explanation, yes. And you’re correct, other novelists do create their own living breathing worlds. Tolkien, the granddaddy of fantasy himself, as well as writing detailed appendices for his seminal works completed a twelve-volume history of Middle Earth (albeit released posthumously) as well as the Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales and more. George Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire is as close to a historical novel as you’ll get in the fantasy genre, and Brandon Sanderson has been developing the background for his Stormlight Archive series, starting with the doorstep-sized The Way of Kings (which to my shame I haven’t yet read, but it’s on the list) for the past ten years. Even Joe Abercrombie, who professes to spend little time on background, has still managed to craft a nuanced setting with an ancient and mysterious history.

So your books have no background? No world for us to dive into a swim around, all the while appreciating your worldbuildy unctuousness?

Well, not exactly.

As a fantasy writer you’ve got to at least develop a cursory background, even if your world is just a mirror for the one we live in. My first novel Kultus is set in the steam-powered metropolis of the Manufactory, although there is a world beyond its walls. With steampunk you’ve already got some recognisable aspects, some tropes that are familiar to the reader and some technological aspects that are at least similar to our own. Still, I think I’ve at least created a living world, even if I haven’t laid it out for the reader like a smorgasbord of historical events.

With epic fantasy on the other hand, which generally takes place in a medieval era of technology, you do have to develop a deep history, magic system, economy, etc. And here lies my problem – I’m currently writing a stonking great trilogy of the most epic of epic fantasies!

So what are you going to do? It’s going to be terrible! A shallow two-dimensional shell of a series!

Piffle and tosh I say!

It’s not just that other people do it so much better, that I’m not ready to flagellate myself for my lack of worldbuilding proficiency. At the end of the day books are about characters! Contrary to what you might have heard, characters are the foundations around which a novel is written. In fact they’re more than the foundations, they’re the bricks and mortar. Maybe even the roof too.

Background is merely window dressing, it’s the context within which you’ve created the book, but it’s certainly not the be-all and end-all. You can have a great novel with poor worldbuilding as long as the characters are living breathing people who leap out of the page and grab you, pulling you into their adventures and making you care for them. A world can be as rich and detailed as you like, but if the characters are two-dimensional, if you couldn’t give a monkey’s whether they live or die, the novel is ultimately doomed!

Saying all this (and at the risk of contradicting myself) the best novels in the genre are the ones which combine a strong, developed, fictional universe with strong, developed characters. And in many ways, these two things work hand-in-hand.

From my own experiences I’ve found that a world will develop organically around your characters and plot – which should always come first. When you’ve got a character who’s lived a life (at least in your head) you need to know where he’s been, what he’s done and who he’s done it with. That’s not to say you need to know the thousand year history of your world, but at least an idea of your characters’ experiences is crucial to building their depth.

So will I be developing the world for my epic fantasy? Will I be building its cultures and races and cosmology? You bet your britches I will. But I probably won’t beat myself up if I haven’t detailed who the king’s great, great grandfather was or what his capital city was called a thousand years ago. These are things that can be firmed up during the writing, and if the reader doesn’t need to know, then I don’t have to tell them. All they need to know about is the characters, and they should want to follow them through the story.

Oh, and they need to love them too… or at least love to hate them!

Richard Ford’s Kultus was published in October 2011, and is available from:

• Amazon UK
• Amazon US
• and many more places

Thirteen months of infinity plus: a whirlwind guide to ebooks for your Kindle

That thing the Reduced Shakespeare company do? You know: the entire works of the Bard in less than an hour. Well this post is kind of like that, only not Shakespeare, and it’ll take far less than an hour.

Let’s start with Eric Brown. We’ve been lucky enough to bring out the first ebook editions of several of his books, including the first edition in any format of his latest short story collection The Angels of Life and Death. His work is typified by his landmark novel Penumbra, a large-canvas story of space exploration and aliens, and a human race that is cosmopolitan and miles away from any stereotypical WASP future. For something a bit different, we also have his ghostly story of love, loss and writing, A Writer’s Life.

John Grant has won numerous awards, including the World Fantasy Award and the Hugo. We have fantasy, SF and horror from him in the collection Take No Prisoners and the short novel Qinmeartha and the Girl-child LoChi (published with a bonus novella in our edition). For something a bit different, we have his non-fiction collection Warm Words and Otherwise - some of the most insightful, perceptive and downright funny book reviews you will find anywhere.

Anna Tambour is a quirky satirist of the fantastic loved by many and sadly overlooked by many more who have yet to discover her work. Luckily, the infinity plus editions of her novel Spotted Lily and collection Monterra’s Deliciosa & Other Tales & have brought her to new audiences, hitting Amazon top tens in recent weeks.

Kaitlin Queen is a successful children’s author now finding success as an adult crime-writer. She has a new story due from PS Publishing in 2012, and her novel One More Unfortunate has been a big success for infinity plus, another top ten title in more than one category at Amazon.

The infinity plus book imprint got off the ground with collections of my own short fiction, and more recently brought out electronic editions of my big fantasy novel about the death of religion and magic Lord of Stone, and my SF thriller The Accord, described by SF Site, The Guardian and SFF Signal as one of the best books on virtual reality and transhumanism yet written, and by SciFi Wire as “a literary science fiction tour de force”.

We’re approaching 20,000 downloads of Iain Rowan’s work at infinity plus. His gritty, moving and very clever collection of crime fiction Nowhere To Go has topped Amazon’s short fiction charts and received some fantastic reviews.

Neil Williamson’s The Ephemera is a powerful collection of short SF and fantasy from an emerging author short-listed for this year’s BSFA short fiction award, while Garry Kilworth’s new collection The Phoenix Man, exclusive to infinity plus, is another showcase for an author described by New Scientist as ”the best short story writer in any genre”.

Robert Freeman Wexler’s The Circus of the Grand Design is a circus novel unlike any other: imagine Ray Bradbury’s carnival fiction mashed up with Angela Carter and quite a lot of sex and you’d still only be scratching its wonderfully freakish and fascinating surface. And new to the infinity plus list, Stephen Palmer’s Hallucinating and Muezzinland offer helter-skelter, incendiary visions of how the nearish future might be.

Finally, there’s the small matter of the fifteen titles in our infinity plus singles list: short, cheap ebooks, each consisting of a single story. This list includes Eric Brown’s Interzone poll-winning The Time-lapsed Man, Lisa Tuttle’s Nebula-winning The Bone Flute (including a new essay on the controversy arising when she tried to turn down the award), Garry Kilworth’s Interzone poll-winning The Sculptor, and many more.

Phew… and breathe… There: a whirlwind tour of where we’ve reached after our first 13 months as an ebook imprint. Compressing it like this really does the list no justice, but if nothing else, it’s been a useful exercise for me, a chance to step back, catch my breath and think, “Wow! We really published all these fantastic books…” It’s been quite a year!